Learn basic coding and create a simple app.

“I'm a third year CS student and for the past year I kept hearing the same thing from every senior developer, every reddit thread, every youtube video: just build projects, that's how you actually learn. So after finishing a Python course I decided to do exactly that and build something small on my own, a web scraper that would collect apartment listings and notify me when something matched my filters. Seemed reasonable. I had no idea what I was about to walk into. I finished something working after about two weeks and it was genuinely one of the best learning experiences I've had, but I think the reason "just build projects" feels useless as advice is that nobody tells you the project will completley fall apart four times before it works and that is the actual point. If someone had told me upfront that constant breakage is the mechanism and not a sign I'm doing it wrong I would have panicked so much less in week one.”

“Hi! During the last few months, I've been improving my coding chops, and finished the V1 of my first app, so here's a little post on how I built my first SaaS, from idea to launch: Since I have a demanding job and cannot spend dozens of hours coding every week, I needed to build an MVP quickly. So I looked for templates and open source projects that I could "yoink" so I could build a proper MVP fast, and after a few days of searching, I had found it! So I got started and cloned it, changed the copy, changed a bit of logic, improved the SEO and made a video trailer, so everything makes sense for a YouTube job platform. So after around 3 weeks of work, I was finally ready to officially publish it, but something stopped my progress for months... The same exact day I finished my MVP [...] I looked back at my little prototype. And in one day, all the motivation in me was gone. I thought that my app sucked. That it was useless. So I gave up.”